Tag: Shakespeare In Pop Culture

We are delighted to announce Kate Sketchley will be joining us to play Snug for Mechanicals’ Macbeth at the Criterion New Writing Showcase.

Kate Sketchley trained at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland after obtaining a BSc in Psychology at McGill University. She is well versed in classical, contemporary and devised work, most recently participating in the development and performance of Shame: A Double Bill, a dance theatre piece at Rich Mix. In addition to acting, Kate is a writer and is currently developing two pieces of her own work.

Kate has worked with us throughout our R&D period on Mechanicals’ Macbeth and performed as Snout for us in Pop Up Shakespeare – Mechanicals’ Macbeth: A Witches Extract. We are so pleased to be working with her again!

We are excited to announce Tom Pepper as Iachimo for the second dualogue in our Et Tu series. Et Tu: Iachimo & Goneril involves the two minor villains meeting over wine and discussing the finer points of their tragedies and triumphs.

Tom trained at the Guildford School of Acting, Exeter University and the National Youth Theatre.

His theatre credits include Cohen/Speedy in Yank the Musical (Charing Cross Theatre, West End and Hope Mill Theatre, Manchester), Elvis Horsepole in Andy Capp the Musical (Finborough Theatre), Deputy in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Arts Theatre), Custus/Fight Captain in Crazy For You (Upstairs at the Gatehouse), Daryl Grady in Curtains (Landor Theatre) and Patrick in Sniper (Upstairs at the Arts Theatre).

As part of our continuing management and growth of this platform we have diversified our social media to instagram – we have the same handle as our twitter @insouliloquy and are already busy posting #behindthescenes photos, stills and various bits and pieces from existing and new work.

Both of us love instagram. It’s a platform we enjoy as well as twitter – so please come check us out. One of the key pieces of new content we are launching on this platform is #ShakesHead – a talking heads doodle web comic with Shakespeare’s bust and Yorick having a rather one sided conversation. It’s pretty simple but totally cute.

#ShakesHead One.

At the moment it’s very low tech, non-fancy but we shall see how it develops as we potter along. #ShakesHead is a little ambitious – certainly in terms of zines.

We will be cross posting, some of the content here to the blog – collating a (optimistically) weekly #ShakesHead blog post for example. In the mean time – we’d love to see you there!

When people ask us about 2016 and what we achieved it’s often quite overwhelming to communicate the scale of In Souliloquy and the amount of work we actually did across the year. This started as a little project and has evolved into anything but that – although at it’s core it remains essentially what we set out to do. To celebrate Shakespeare, his work and to reclaim the voices of characters lost in the plays and time since.

We’ve grown too, as producers and artists. Our vision has opened up and we are very excited to bring new creations to you in 2017.

Thank you to everyone who has collaborated with us this year, your time, talent and work has been essential to the ongoing success of this project. Thank you to those who voted on that terrible website, supported by viewing our videos and put up with us talking Shakespeare all the time. We are pretty chuffed with your support and confident we can reward it by continuing to make good art (hat tip Neil Gaiman) this new year.

On this day where there seems little to celebrate we are announcing the next stage of our In Souliloquy project. Snout In Souliloquy is a monologue we have shared with artists around the world (#WorldStage) who are then returning their work to us to distribute a collection of their diverse and exciting interpretations.

So, we are here and we are building a wall. Of sorts. Not one to keep anyone out or to imprison ourselves but to connect with each other. It’s a wall on a stage, a digital stage – it’s a wall played by a person who fixes things and believes in the power of art and theatre to connect with people. It’s a wall played by an artist that appreciates the world and their part in it and challenges us to see how we live in a new celebratory light.

In Souliloquy is about connecting through characters and experience across time and giving voices and new understanding to known stories. It also involves connecting to each other now. Digital Theatre reaches new audiences outside a traditional context, it lets us watch in bed, or on a train and experience that one on one connection to each another person through a tiny screen. A soul is speaking to you. Listen.

One of us voted in this American Election. One of us voted in the Brexit referendum. Both of us grieved the outcomes of both. We are so very proud to be producing this next level of In Souliloquy in this context. Now more than ever we need to make good art (hat tip Neil Gaiman) to respond, challenge and connect us to new understandings of each other and the world.

We are theatre people. We make good theatre. We share it and we reach through whatever disconnect people feel. Here, come sit with us.

Let’s build something together, a stage – upon which sits a wall, for all.

Stay tuned for the release of Snout In Souliloquy in the second half of this month!

XX

PS. If you are interested in being involved/you know someone in a far flung corner of this planet who might be – do drop us a line!

One of my good friends loves art in the way I do – she becomes emotionally attached to it and it informs her own creative process and writing. One such piece is Ophelia – Millais. She loves it. We had dinner last week with two other friends and I had such a violent reaction to her raptures it led to an interesting discussion. She and one other emphasising how beautiful it is with the other side of the table not disputing the beauty but saying it’s also really, really horrible.

I just can’t bear this fetishising of death. Ophelia is not a lost love-lorn princess asleep in a river – she is a person who made the choice, the final choice to kill herself in a horrible way. Her death is not about flowers floating in dark water, it’s about sinking away from the light. It is such classical male gaze – to take a decision made by a girl and strip it of any meaning beyond aesthetics. I actually didn’t realised how angry about this until a) I wrote Ophelia and b) how surprised everyone was to my visceral disgust at seeing a postcard.

Ophelia In Souliloquy deals with this directly. She is at once accepting and embracing the she has chosen and also quietly furious at how it has been memorialised.

She doesn’t care if we do not understand why, but there is a why far beyond the absence we get in the play and the famous images of her death that litter our art history. In truth the images of her lying back forever half submerged make her skin crawl. Ophelia is honest, she does not care for beauty.

As you watch this performance, watch the lovely and talented Lilian Schiffer work her way through the shifts in the text as she rises above her grave. At some key moments her eyes focus on you watching and she won’t let you look away. Don’t paint over her pain, she says – I am far more than written. Listen to what I am saying and hear my grief, my anger, my despair and finally my salvation.

I think as artists we have responsibilities to engage with what has come before. There is no doubt that Hamlet is an incredible piece of writing and that Millais’ Ophelia is an exquisite rendering of a pre-Raphelite aesthetic – but think on this. The girl whose death is reduced to how it effects another and is only remembered as beauty? The female voice is so often removed or silenced from history. Ophelia is so much more than that. We are all more than that.